Your fox’s jump is a little awkward and areas it can seemingly traverse aren’t always the solid and steady ground they appeared to be before you leapt up onto them. Snow-covered glaciers, beautiful green tundra, and dark chilly caves definitely had a lot of love put into their aesthetics even if their design as game environments leave much to be desired. The places you travel through on this journey can be quite stunning and beautiful, the game drawing heavy inspiration from Iceland’s natural environments. Since the game never comes out and says anything about the plot, the fact you’re helping to restore the Northern Lights is mostly conveyed through late game actions and inscriptions on stones and walls. You don’t seem to be able to trigger it to give you hints manually though, so you often have to hope it will give you some guidance if you’re stuck and wondering what you’re meant to do in one of the many open areas of the game. While you could bark at her and get a reply before, she quickly gets downgraded to something more like Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, buzzing around you and sometimes flitting over to areas of interest to highlight them. However, while it does seem like you’re meant to develop a sort of companionship with this other fox, very quickly she gets demoted to a mote of light that loses any sort of personality or character. A strange red corruption has been spotted in the sky, your fox heading after it and joining up with a ghostly blue fox for the adventure. Spirit of the North has you begin as a rather gorgeously detailed red fox, although from certain angles its fur rendering doesn’t look perfect.
Spirit of the North, however, completely avoids words and practically has no narrative, choosing instead to be a meditative journey where you are meant to extract meaning from some rather basic and repeated images and details. Both are indie games I played on PS4 where you play as a fox, explore wide open and often beautiful areas, and undergo some sort of spiritual journey, although The First Tree is happy to throw in narration and make it more about the storytellers than your adventure as the vulpine protagonist. It was practically inevitable that I’d compare Spirit of the North with The First Tree.
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